TUMBLEWEED Hard drive auto powers ON a few seconds after it was powered OFF

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Hard drive auto powers ON a few seconds after it was powered OFF

Hi,

There is a laptop which I am trying to configure. Most of the time all it is used for is to replay to infinity the same mp3 file (which is a small file, just 18mb) which is first copied to tmpfs /tmp and mplayer loops it from there. The laptop is used with the lid closed and in runlevel 3. I am trying to make it NOT to use the hard drive during that kind of use as it is simply not necessary.

I have set the ext4 fs mount point with 'noatime' parameter both for / and /home. I also have in /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf

I can hear the hard drive powering off. However in 2-3 seconds it wakes up again without any user action - no keyboard press, network cable is pulled off, no mouse/touchpad use, there is no wifi adapter on this PC and no USB or other devices connected.

Re: Hard drive auto powers ON a few seconds after it was powered OFF

Something in the OS is initiating activity, possibly a background housekeeping service.

To identify what that might be, you can
- run iotop, which displays your disk activity in real time (naturally, you will need to view your display)
- Possibly that activity might have been written to /proc/diskstats. Less or cat the file.

In any case, running in init 3 may not be good enough, you may want to install a dualboot to a text-only "Server" installation to minimize default running processes.

Re: Hard drive auto powers ON a few seconds after it was powered OFF

Well something is triggering a journal write this may be a periodic error happening causing the write and thus the spin up of the disk. In any case looking at the journal will tell what is causing the write.